Dora García draws on interactivity and performance in her work, using the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between artwork, audience, and place.[1] García transforms spaces into a sensory experiences by altering perception and creating situations of interaction, often using intermediaries (professional actors, amateurs, or people she meets by chance[2]) to enhance critical thinking. By engaging with the binary of reality vs. fiction, visitors become implicated as protagonists either in the construction of a collective fiction or questioning of empirical constructions–sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not. Since 1999 García has created several artworks on the web.

PEI is a learning laboratory that takes place inside and outside the museum institution, and whose main aim is to develop critical thought from the intersection of artistic practices, social sciences and political and institutional interventions.

This project traces historical genealogy of the ways of situating oneself in the modern space, architecture and urbanism, developed between the middle of the 20th century and the present day. Our era has turned living into an administered manner of dwelling. This formula needs turning back to front to make living a political mode of dwelling in the world.

Afternoon:discussing concepts/plans/tasks for the the OPEN!Tot presentation in Athens

Morning and evening:face to face meetings with Florian (except the ones who I already spoke to in Tessaloniki): we will focus on your "other" work.What are you preparing for your kitchen presentation or your final in July? Or are you working on an outside project? You choose what to bring to the table.

At the bottom of this text are links to interviews with and texts by the speakers of21 March. In the evening we will have dinner with the conference guests and organizers. During the conference, ToT members will be asked to write blog comments on the talks, presentations, and screenings. These will be posted on Open! (For earlier blogs see: http://www.onlineopen.org/blog.php.)

Thursday, March 22Arnhem

On Thursdaymorning, back in Arnhem, Marianna will meet with the group and with individual students to coordinate the blogging and publishing.

I would like to think together about the haptic qualities of written and spoken language, and in particular about the mouth as a site of contact. Mouths are warm wet cavities into which food goes, and out of which words come. With these erogenous (‘eros generating’) zones, we taste, kiss, suck, sigh, sing, sip, spew forth, and get to know the world. Mouths are also sites of disciplinary inscription, where unevenly distributed regimes of power make contact with the flesh. In this seminar, we will draw from a range of historical and artistic reference points to consider disobedient mouths, paying particular attention to bodies and their modes of intersensorial contact, contagion, and contamination (all words coming from con + tangere meaning ‘touching together’).

Seen from the touch-relationship that emerges from the meeting of music and the body, Tchong will share his personal and professional background and talk about the cultural history of salsa, cultural journalism and his new projects, moving over from reporting to creating. For this last part, he will bring the DAI students into motion… [This guest lecture is prepared together with dramaturge, researcher and critic Fransien van der Putt.]

Suggested reading: students may prepare themselves by reading this, this or this. [JORINDE TO SUPPLY LINKS]

Jaïr Tchong works as a journalist, was a programmer for Tolhuistuin (organizing concerts, dance events, screenings and whatnot) and Melkweg (organizing world music), and in recent years has been a funding advisor for local and national cultural subsidies in the Netherlands. He also regularly publishes writing on film, music and other cultural events. "In all three domains of my work I am powered by the feeling (in a sense a construction) not fully belonging to the Dutch people, with my Aruban-Chinese dad (and a Dutch mother who taught me how to appreciate jazz).”

Evening:

Free work space

22 February

Morning:

With Marianna: continuation of the writing exercises; update progress on individual works.

Seminar 4: 22-27 January 2018

Florian Göttke will be present from Monday evening until Thursday morning

Marianna Maruyama will be present from Tuesday morning until Saturday morning

Getting our hands dirty, publishing our plans

Monday, 22 January

Monday evening we will watch video material related to the topic of touch and briefly discuss.

Tuesday, 23 January

Tuesday morning we will start with a physical exercise to awaken our senses. Afterwards, the students will present and discuss their ideas for the final work in June. We will form workgroups to develop ideas for the form of the final presentation.

In the afternoon we will continue with the Reading Group. This month’s session will be moderated by Sanne and Anja on the text “On Touching — The Inhuman That Therefore I Am”, by Karen Barad.

Wednesday, 24 January

Wednesday morning we will have a guest seminar by Hypatia Vourloumis on touch.

'Ten Theses on Touch' by Hypatia Vourloumis. Wildness Master Final by Michelle Lawler.

In the afternoon, we will have an opportunity to meet individually or in pairs with Hypatia Vourloumis. Those who are not meeting with Hypatia will have time to work on the lexicon publishing project. In the evening, Florian will be conducting face-to-face meetings.

Thursday, 25 January

Thursday morning and afternoon will be devoted to the try-out publication of the lexicon, guided by Marianna. This is the time to get our hands dirty and bring our ideas outside the edges of our small group. In the evening, Marianna will conduct face-to-face meetings.

Friday, 26 January

On Friday morning the work groups for the final presentation prepare for afternoon presentations.

The Friday afternoon and evening extension, carrying us through to Saturday morning will give us the chance to try out some final presentation ideas.

Keeping up our practice, every day we will continue to experiment with our student-led and tutor-led physical and sensory-attuning exercises, this time, making contact with the spaces of our host city, Thessaloniki.

Monday evening we will watch video material related to the topic of touch. On Thursday morning we will start with a meditation or work out to wake up our senses, and then continue with the Reading Group. This month’s session will be moderated by Aldo and Alejandro. The text we’ll be focussing on is “Negotiating Influence: Touch and Tango”, the first chapter from Erin Manning’s Politics of Touch (Minnesota Press, 2006). On Thursday afternoon we will have a guest seminar and dance class by Jaïr Tchong and Kim Arnold on touch, salsa dancing and the body. Suggested reading: David Byrne, I hate World Music (NYT, 1999). In the evening we will have a collective mind mapping session about Topologies of Touch. The next morning and afternoon we will be baking bread and get our hands into the warm and sticky fertile growing dough. While doing that we will think and talk about alternative epistemologies: thinking through food, thinking through practice, thinking through feeling. Suggested reading: Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South by anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Alongside the baking, face to face meetings with Marianna and Florian take place about the Lexicon contributions. On Thursday morning the face to face meetings continue.

Jaïr Tchong began as a journalist, was a programmer for Tolhuistuin (all around) and Melkweg (world music), and in recent years has been a funding advisor for local and national cultural subsidies in the Netherlands. He also regularly publishes writing on film, music and other cultural events. "In all three domains of my work I am powered by the feeling (in a sense a construction) of not fully belonging to the Dutch people, with my Aruban-Chinese dad (and a Dutch mother who taught me how to appreciate jazz!).”

Kim Arnold is a Utrecht theater maker. Through her background in dramaturgy Kim combines a broad knowledge and an investigating attitude with a sober vision on play, resulting in a sharp look at what a performance needs. Location theater is a recurring theme in her work.

On Monday evening, the study group, including Jorinde, is going to work on the Topologies of Touch lexicon, jointly and individually. We’ll discuss its concept, look at the headwords and images we have collected so far and we’ll start writing the entries.

Tuesday in the morning, the Reading Group, moderated by students Jasmin and Ines, will go into notions of hapticality by discussing Jack Halberstam’s introduction to Stefano Harney’s / Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minorcompositions, 2013), Chapter 6 ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, p. 84-100 of the same book, and Stefano Harney’s essay Hapticality in theUndercommons, or FromOperationsManagement to Black Ops. In the afternoon, with all three tutors present, we will go to the beach for a ‘haptic walk’, and muse about the larger individual work each participant will have to create. How is this work relating to the topic of Touch? How is it evolving out of one’s own practice? How can one use text as an affective instrument, write in a bodily form or write with a physical work? Tuesday evening is free workspace.

On Wednesday morning, Florian will give a talk on touch from the perspective of his own artistic practice and research. In the afternoon, Marianna and the study group will look at the writing assignments she commissioned in the previous DAI-week – the self-interview and the ‘listening - speaking on behalf of another’ exercise – and begin working on the next one. At the same time and in the evening Florian is having face to face meetings with each student. On Thursday morning, each participant has to perform a short lecture: Choose an image, from high art, popular culture or the news media and present it in a lecture-performance in relation to Touch.

Seminar1: 23-26 October 2017

This very first gathering of the Open! Coop Academy study group will be used to get to know each other’s practices by way of lecture-presentations, an experimental writing exercise (self-interview) and listening exercise (‘Listening. Speaking for another artist, speaking on behalf of another.’). We will also try to gain insight into each other’s particular interests with the topic of touch. By discussing relevant introductory literature and by watching and talking about some (excerpts of) artist’s video works (by Valie Export, Yvonne Rainer, among others) we will start breaking open and mapping the subject matter, at the same time localizing terms and concepts for the Topologies of Touch lexicon – one of the assignments.